child: theoretically, Child graduated eighth grade, so....

In reward for Child bootstrapping his way through math, see below cut.





The original plan was for blue or green for the last two days of school, but all they had was pink, so Child made do, and boy did he.

The thing is, it still throws me, how little he cares about what people think of him. Family and friends he takes under advisement, but the general world as far as he's concerned can kinda fuck themselves. He's always faintly surprised by the idea of disapproval is something to be worried about from the general population, from anyone, and bewildered by the idea that he should care.

My mom once said, in frustration, that it's impossible to make him interested in something by sheer persistence; he evaluates the activity, attempts the activity (maybe), and finds it good or not on its own merits. As a parent, it's frustrating as hell, but as a parent, it's also comforting; at the end of the day, he may knock over a bank or joy ride a car when he gets farther into his teens, but he won't go along with his friends because they did it. No, he'll do it because he found it lots of fun. And he has an ethical code that may not be mine but it rock-solid and unbendable; I'm not sure I can say that about myself, but his is there, and he's as angry with himself as anyone else when he breaks it.

He bends for me, he'll go along with something for me, but he doesn't do it because he's afraid, but because he loves me, because I love him, because at the end of the day, he may not agree with my decision--I can't ever make him agree if he just doesn't feel it--but he acknowledges my right to make it. He may argue me down (and has, I figure if he wants it badly enough, he can damn well make a presentation on the subject), but there's a part of me that does smile when he doesn't agree but does it anyway, knowing that my will guides him but doesn't--change him, not unless he wants it to.

I come in to find him playing airplane with his three year old cousins, red-faced and giggling, scooping them off the floor to soar around the room; my sisters trust him to babysit the way they don't even trust me; he's friends with girls with the same ease he is with boys; he emails me at three in the morning with the secrets he can't share in daylight hours when we're only a room apart because he knows I'll listen to what he can't yet say when he's not yet ready to talk; you can't argue him down, shout him down, make him shut up, but he'll listen when you talk; he's very probably going to end up in a garage band or working on a nuclear reactor or cloning reptile people or working as a waiter or conquering the world; marry an extraordinary girl or an incredible guy or never marry at all; have a dozen kids or adopt a half-dozen or be the uncle-friend whose house is a sanctuary of video games and experiments gone wrong; I don't know where he'll end up and neither does he, and sometimes the best part is everything will always, always be a surprise. I'll be surprised when he's twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, and it will always shake my world apart like the day he was born, cone-headed and red and unsurprised that I fell in love with him before I heard his first irritable scream because like I said, I can make him go along with me but that doesn't mean he will agree, but he's never doubted me and how I feel about him, even if at first I doubted myself.

I can make him laugh when I ask him if I'm ruining his life yet; if he's posted sad poetry about crows and death and no one understanding his pain; if he ready to be a teenager and scream he wishes he'd never been born. He snickers when his friends call me Gigantor because I still top most of them by a head or so even when I'm not wearing heels; he wants to be cuddled and petted when he's sick; when I'm unhappy, the first thing he does is pull me in for a hug. He wants to go to Chicago and free the Komodo dragon from it's captivity at the aquarium (every. damn. year). He wants to make instructional origami vids for the web.

My kid starts high school next year and we're arguing whether he'll take Turkish or French or German, if he'll test into the advanced math class, if he'll post to ff.net, and boy would I kill for a fangirl-parent/kid con where we could throw all our kids in a room just to see what happens.

Still in love with my kid. Just in case you were curious.